PARIS 1919 (38 page)

Then there was the problem of Upper Silesia, an area of about 11,000 square kilometers (4,200 square miles) where Poland's borders met Germany's in the south. It was a rich prize, with mines and iron and steel mills. The Commission on Polish Affairs had awarded it to Poland on the grounds that about 65 percent of its inhabitants were Polish-speaking. The Germans protested. The Silesian mines were responsible for almost a quarter of Germany's annual output of coal, 81 percent of its zinc and 34 percent of its lead. The German government argued that the award also violated the principle of self-determination: the people of Upper Silesia were German and Czech and the local Poles, whose dialect was heavily influenced by German, had never demonstrated the slightest interest in the Polish cause. Upper Silesia had been separated from Poland for centuries; its prosperity owed everything to German industry and German capital. Poland already had enough coal; Germany, particularly with the loss of the Saar, did not. “Germany cannot spare Upper Silesia; Poland does not need it.” If Germany lost Upper Silesia, the German note concluded, it would not be able to fulfill its other obligations under the treaty.
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On May 30 Lloyd George had his old friend Riddell, the newspaper magnate, to dinner. “Just read that,” he said, handing him the note, “and tell me what you think of it.” To get Riddell in the mood, he put a roll of Chopin into his player piano. When Riddell argued that there were strategic considerations for giving Upper Silesia to Poland, Lloyd George agreed but pointed out the threat to reparations. “If the Poles won't give the Germans the products of the mines on reasonable terms, the Germans say they cannot pay the indemnity. Therefore the Allies may be cutting off their noses to spite their faces if they hand the mines to the Poles without regard to the question of the indemnity.” The two men went off to a singsong in Balfour's flat upstairs.
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The next day, Lloyd George brought key cabinet members over from London for an emergency meeting. On June 1, the British empire delegation authorized him to go back to the Council of Four and ask for modifications in the terms on reparations, on the Rhineland occupation and on Upper Silesia. Smuts was particularly firm on the need to revise the German-Polish borders. “Poland was an historic failure, and always would be a failure, and in this Treaty we were trying to reverse the verdict of history.” He also said privately that putting Germans under Polish rule was as bad as handing them over to a lot of kaffirs. Balfour thought Smuts a bit hard on Poland, but agreed, as did everyone else, that there should be a plebiscite in Upper Silesia.
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Lloyd George's colleagues in the Council of Four did not relish changing the terms, which had taken so long to put together. In an acrimonious meeting on June 3, Clemenceau categorically opposed a plebiscite. Although Poles were in a majority, they could not possibly vote freely when the local administration was still German. Wilson agreed. His experts told him that the big landowners and capitalists were all German. Well then, said Lloyd George, the Allies would have to bring in troops to supervise the voting. It would be a small price to pay if it avoided trouble with Germany over the treaty. “It is better to send an American or English division to Upper Silesia than an army to Berlin.” He quoted self-determination at the president. Wilson, who was fair-minded, began to back down. Clemenceau, considerably disturbed, saw no alternative but to do the same. A plebiscite would take place, but not until the Allies were convinced that it could be held fairly. Paderewski protested, to no avail. “Don't forget,” Lloyd George said sharply, “your liberty was paid for with the blood of other peoples, and truly, if Poland, in these circumstances, should revolt against our decisions, she would be something quite other than we had hoped.”
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Arranging the plebiscite took months, partly because the situation in Upper Silesia was deteriorating as Poles rose up against the Germans, partly because the Allies had trouble finding the troops. There were also disagreements over whether only those actually living in Silesia could vote (the choice of the Polish government) or whether former residents could vote as well (as the Germans preferred). The German government won that argument and on a Sunday in March 1921, as trainloads of German Silesians rolled in to the sound of band music, the vote finally took place. The north and west chose Germany, the south Poland, and the middle, which with all its industry was what both Poland and Germany wanted, divided almost evenly. Further months of negotiations, with the British backing Germany and the French Poland, produced only deadlock. The whole issue was finally turned over to the League, where four powers with no direct interest in the matter—Belgium, China, Spain and Brazil—drew a line that left 70 percent of the area in Germany but gave most of the industries and mines to Poland. In 1922, in one of the longest treaties ever seen, Germany and Poland agreed on economic and political cooperation and the protection of their respective minorities.
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But the Germans resented the loss of Upper Silesia as much as that of Danzig and the corridor. In 1939, Hitler annexed the whole to Germany. In 1945, it went back to Poland and most, but not all, of the Germans living there fled or were expelled.

Settling Poland's borders in the east, where anarchists, Bolsheviks, White Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Baltic Germans were jostling for power, was even more difficult. The peacemakers did not know how many countries they would be dealing with, or which governments. The Commission on Polish Affairs was instructed to go ahead anyway and duly worked out a border that brought all the clearly Polish territories into Poland. In December 1919, what was left of the Supreme Council approved what came to be known as the Curzon Line (roughly the line of Poland's eastern border today). The Polish government did not have the slightest intention of accepting this. While the peacemakers had been busy with their maps, Polish forces had been equally busy on the ground. All along the disputed borderlands, Poland had staked out much greater claims, which were to be settled largely by success or failure in war.

Pi
sudski's emotions were most deeply engaged in the northeast. On his father's side he came from a Polish-Lithuanian family; an ancestor had helped to create the union between Poland and Lithuania in the fifteenth century. Vilna was the only place where he truly felt at home.
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He wanted his birthplace for Poland, together with a slice of southeastern Lithuania. This brought Polish demands up against those of the emerging Lithuanian nation and into the whole peace settlement in the Baltic.

A map of the eastern end of the Baltic in 1919 would have shown many question marks. Only Finland in the north had managed to establish a precarious sort of independence from Russia, after a vicious civil war between its own Whites and Reds. The Peace Conference recognized Finland in the spring of 1919. To its south the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had also tried to declare themselves independent from Russia, but they had to deal with a German occupation and their own German or Russian minorities. None had secure borders or established governments, and what the Russians had not destroyed in their retreat, the Germans had requisitioned. White Russians, Red Bolsheviks, Green anarchists, the Baltic Barons, German freebooters, embryonic national armies and simple gangsters ebbed and flowed across the land. Cities and towns changed hands repeatedly. At sea, the remnants of the Russian Imperial Navy, now under Bolshevik command, darted out from Petrograd to spread revolution.

The Allies had concerns but no coherent policy. If they recognized the Baltic nations, they were, in a sense, interfering in Russia's internal affairs. The Americans were for self-determination but hesitated to accord full recognition because Wilson did not want to change Russia's borders unilaterally. The British and the French hoped, at least until the summer of 1919, that Admiral Kolchak would defeat the Bolsheviks, and Kolchak strongly opposed independence for any part of the Russian empire. The French preferred to let the British worry about the Baltic while they looked after Poland. The British sent a small naval force—all they could spare—to bottle up the Bolshevik fleet in Petrograd/Leningrad and to find, if it could, some local democratic forces to support. Its admiral was warned not to get caught by mines or ice and to resist Bolshevik attacks, but only at a safe distance from land. “The work of British naval officers in the Baltic,” wrote the Admiralty to the Foreign Office in the spring of 1919, “would be much facilitated if they could be informed of the policy which they are required to support.”
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As a stopgap measure, the Allies instructed the German government to leave its troops in the Baltic after the armistice. Rather humiliating, said Balfour, but there did not appear to be an alternative. This created its own problems. The German high command was delighted. Neither the military nor German nationalists wanted to give up their Baltic conquests, which they saw as a barrier against Bolshevism and the Slavic menace (often the same thing, in the lurid imaginings of the right). The Baltic lands were hallowed by the blood of the Teutonic Knights who had fought for them centuries ago; they were also a redoubt where Germany might regroup against the Allies.
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On Christmas Day, 1918, the provisional president of Latvia, an agricultural expert from the University of Nebraska, appealed, with the acquiescence of the local British naval commander, to the Germans for help. His pathetically weak forces were about to be overrun by Bolsheviks. His appeal opened the door to a new type of Teutonic Knight, the Freikorps, a group of private armies forming in Germany. Their members had volunteered in order to stop Bolshevism, to save civilization, for the promise of land or simply for adventure and a free meal.

By February 1919 the Freikorps were pouring into Baltic cities and towns. Some of the troops looked like soldiers; others grew their hair long and shot out windows and street lamps for target practice. They treated the locals, whom they had ostensibly come to save, with contempt. In April they overthrew the Latvian government and headed into Estonia, even though the Bolsheviks were withdrawing. The peacemakers, who had paid little attention to the Baltic, grew perturbed. “Odd,” said Balfour, “given the chaos now reigning in those areas, the Germans, by preventing the formation of local armies, and by forcing the countries which they occupy to rely entirely upon their aid against the Bolshevik invasion, are working for the permanence of their influence and domination.” In May the Allies sent a mission to help the Baltic governments organize their own armies.
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The difficulty now was to get the Freikorps to withdraw. Stern notes went from Paris to Berlin. The German government sent its own orders to the Freikorps commander, General Colmar von der Goltz, who ignored them. “It is a frightful confusion,” complained Lloyd George. In August the German government finally managed to get von der Goltz back to Germany. His men remained behind, under the command of a braggart Russian aristocrat who dreamed of reconquering Russia. Since he announced that the Baltic states were Russian again and that he intended to recruit their inhabitants as slave labor, he failed to gain any support beyond the local Germans. By the end of 1919, the Freikorps had slunk back to Germany, where they fulminated against the Allies, the Slavs and their own government. Many, including von der Goltz himself, were to find a spiritual home with Hitler and the Nazis. The Allies finally recognized the independence of Estonia and Latvia in January 1921.
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Lithuania, the southernmost of the Baltic states, had an even more complicated birth, if possible, because it had also to deal with Poland. In 1919, the great majority of Poles wanted to restore the old union between Poland and Lithuania, but this time with Poland firmly in control. The Lithuanians, said Dmowksi dismissively, were merely a tribe; much better for them to become Polish. Poland should absorb all areas with a Polish majority—self-determination, of course—but also those where there was a large Polish minority, which could act as the agent of civilization. The areas to the north where Lithuanians were the vast majority could be made into a little Lithuanian state. If it wanted to unite with Poland, it could have home rule. Pi
sudski and the left were prepared to contemplate a looser federal arrangement. No one took account of the Lithuanians themselves, now in the grip of an awakening nationalism.
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